On the trail of ghosts in Ballarat

We've all heard a ghost story - they're the kind of thing that comes out at every bonfire.

You might even have a few ghost tales up your sleeve yourself.

Imagine making it your job to find out the ghost stories in a town and then telling these five nights a week.

Nathaniel Buchanan has done exactly this in different parts of the world.

Now he's settled in Ballarat and, along with being a teacher, he's leads ghosts tours around the most historic parts of the city.

"I'm a historian by trade. I did numerous years at the University of Queensland and ended up with a Bachelor of Education," Nathaniel says, explaining how he became a ghost tour guide.

"I went to England...and ended up getting a job as a tour guide for a company called Contiki, which led me all over the place.

"We went to a lot of interesting places - my favourite places were always the darker places, castles, tours of two concentration camps...I ended up working for a couple of ghost tours over in Europe.

"As a tour guide you like to get an emotional response from people and I found that the places with the darker history would always get the most interesting response.

"When I came back to Australia I had the world at my feet and thought the best place to work would be Port Arthur.

"Long story short, I ended up in Ballarat because of a girl and I saw the town and thought, 'This place is screaming out for a ghost tour'."

Nathaniel takes his job seriously - there's a lot of background behind the stories he tells.

"It was a lot of research," he says.

"We went through newspapers, books, interviewing people who had lived in town for a while, talking to the people who operate businesses in a lot of the buildings.

"We started to have unusual things happening on our tour as well, occasionally you get one of those little incidences where someone has an experience that just makes a fantastic story to tell...people smell something - we go into an underground building which is the old New York Bakery and people go down there having no idea what's there and they say they can smell cooking…that room hasn't been cooked in for a long time."

You might think that to be a ghost tour guide, you'd have to believe in spirits.

But Nathaniel tries to maintain a healthy scepticism, even though he says he has seen some extraordinary things.

"I consider myself a sceptic, but also an open-minded sceptic," he says.

"It's probably good practice to have an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.

"I have only had one experience that made me question everything I understood about the world...I saw someone actually attacked by something in front of a group of people, she was dragged across the room and I went home that night having to re-evaluate everything I knew.

"We get a lot of photographs of things, a lot of orbs.

"I'm quick to dismiss orbs as being light reflecting off dust particles in the air…[but] the whole world is made up of energy in one way or another and the eye can only pick up only so many frames of energy, and cameras are capable of picking up different kinds of energy."

Usually, ghost stories are told to scare us.

Think of the stories you've heard - they're all meant to be a little creepy.

But Nathaniel would rather tell stories that trigger an interest rather than an out-and-out fear.

"I don't get creeped out by the stories," he says.

"I do love a lot of the stories there and I had people on last night who were laughing at the end of it, saying they were amazed at how excited I get while telling them.

"Towards the end of the tour there's one particular story that I have a lot of interest in myself and I get wound-up when I'm telling the story but people respond to that well because they see that I'm enjoying myself."

If you've thought there might be an opportunity to tell a few ghost stories in your town, be careful - you just might give up your day job.

"I love my job; it's great," Nathaniel says.

"As a tour guide and as a teacher as well, you want to get a response from your audience.

"There are times in the tour when I get certain responses and that's a very satisfying thing - a gasp of anticipation, or you get laughter, or you see people wincing when you tell gory details - those are the responses that make it very satisfying because you know you just hit a nerve."